A voice heard "in my head," not in the room
A 26-year-old woman, recently bereaved, describes hearing her late father's voice from time to time over the past month, saying reassuring things like "you'll be alright." Asked to describe it more, she says, "It's not like hearing an actual sound in the room, it's more like it's happening inside my head, in my own mental space. I know he's not really there and it's not a real voice, but it feels very vivid and clear when it happens, and it isn't something I choose to bring on, it just comes." She finds the experience comforting rather than distressing and retains full awareness throughout that it is not an external, real perception.
This is a pseudohallucination: a vivid, involuntary perceptual experience located in inner, subjective space ("inside my head") rather than projected into the external environment, occurring with full retained insight that it is not a real, externally caused perception. Both of these features — inner location and preserved insight — are what distinguish it from a true hallucination, and her description that it arises unbidden rather than being deliberately conjured is what distinguishes it from an ordinary chosen daydream or memory.
References
- Casey, P. & Kelly, B. (2019). Fish's Clinical Psychopathology, 4th ed. Ch. 3, 'Disorders of Perception'.